Falling Out of Cars
Jeff Noon
Black Swan, 380 pages
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What plot there is in Jeff Noon’s latest novel revolves around Marlene,
a journalist grieving for her dead daughter, and three companions, an ex-thug
named Peacock, an ex-soldier named Henderson, and a teenager named Tupelo.
They, or perhaps the world around them, are sick with a disease that doesn’t
have a name, but manifests itself as something called noise--which, like
the static on a phone line, interrupts signals as they move between transmitter
and receiver, obscuring everything with hiss and crackle. The world is still
there, behind the corrupted messages of the senses, but it can’t be understood:
words can’t be read and music can’t be followed and photos can’t be interpreted
and mirrors have grown terrifying, for to look in them is to fail to recognize
what you see. A drug called Lucidity (which advertises itself with billboards
that say “If you can read this, it means you’re alive”), provides some respite--though
even with their daily Lucy, most people become steadily sicker. Marlene and the others are on a road trip, hunting for the fragments
of a mirror. This job has been given them by a mysterious collector, who
wants to reassemble the mirror. Is the mirror Alice’s mirror, the Through the Looking Glass
mirror, which somehow has been shattered? The collector seems to think so;
healed, he thinks the mirror will have some great power. He has given Marlene
precise instructions, which she holds like a talisman, a spar of meaning
in the rising flood of noise...but as she and her companions drive their
failing car through a world hallucinatorily transformed both by noise and
by their own increasingly unreliable perceptions, the quest, like everything
else, slowly becomes incomprehensible. Some surreal novels are like puzzles; scattered clues and symbols
enable you to decipher them, or to guess at what the author is trying to
say. But Falling Out of Cars
defies this sort of analysis. Marlene’s quest, revealed through the increasingly
disjointed first-person narration of her diary, spins out in a series of
musings, free associations, and bizarre dreamlike scenes that, both in themselves
and in the way they follow (or don’t follow) on one another, give the sense
of being pregnant with a meaning that’s just within reach, but stubbornly
resists revealing itself. This is a novel as opaque as the solipsistic worlds
of fractured perception into which noise forces its victims. Is it an exploration
of the unreliability of self-perception, the subjectivity of communication?
A meditation on semiotics? A portrait of a grieving parent’s longing for
a lost child? A portrayal of a failing mind’s descent into madness? A deconstruction
of linear narrative? Yes. And no. Even as one identifies these themes, one
has the sense that they’re not the point. Or more accurately, that identifying
them is not the point.
An example: the recurring references to Through the Looking Glass.
These rise up out of the book periodically and then sink back into it, like
the images in the lost mirror fragments--Marlene’s quest, the characters’
chess-playing (in which one of the pieces sometimes stands for Alice), a
battered edition of Through the Looking Glass with a poignant added
chapter, in which Alice pines for the world beyond the mirror and we learn
how the mirror may have come to be shattered. The reader wants to put these
things together, to make symbolic sense of them. But when, late in the book,
Marlene finally explains to Tupelo why the collector wants the mirror fragments
and what he thinks reassembling them will accomplish, we don’t find out what
she says. The fact that she speaks is conveyed, but her speech is not. If
there’s any key to this book at all, it’s this deliberate stripping of meaning.
The novel works best if you accept from the start that you won’t
be able to make linear sense of it, and experience it instead as a gathering
of shimmering images, a series of uncanny and strangely beautiful episodes,
from which each reader will take away his or her own unique and incommunicable
perception. A perfect parallelism, in other words, of form and content.
If you can read it, you are alive.
Copyright © 2004 Victoria Strauss
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